Flash Professional and the Future

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Yesterday was probably one of the most overwhelming days of my entire career. First, Adobe informed developers that we are going to stop developing the Flash Player for mobile browsers, then news came out that there were layoffs at Adobe, and finally, Adobe held a financial analyst meeting where we spelled out the Creative Cloud, and the fundamental strategic shift Adobe is making.

All of this news is a lot to digest at once, and I know that there are a lot of questions and concerns from the community about what all of this means. I am working on another blog post which will address this from the Flash community's standpoint, but I wanted to make a quick post and debunk a rumor that has been going around about the future of Flash Professional.
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I have seen a couple of versions of it, but basically, the rumor is that the entire Flash Authoring team was laid off and that we are no longer developing Flash Professional.

Both of these rumors are false.

We are actively working on the next version of Flash Professional and have a long term commitment to it's continued development.

While there were layoffs on the team (as there were on a lot of other teams), we still have a team actively working on future versions of the tool. The Flash Professional team continues to have offices around the world, just as they did prior to the announcements. The core team, including product management and engineering members, continue and will continue to be based in San Francisco.

I can't go into a ton of detail about all of the new features and improvements included in the next version of Flash Professional (we gave a sneak of some of them at FOTB Brighton last month), but some of the new features include:

SpriteSheet export for both Starling and HTML5 / Canvas. Lee Brimelow has a sneak here.

Support for packaging and exporting AIR applications for mobile that leverage native extensions.

Mobile prototyping and simulation for AIR apps.

In addition to working on new features, we are also in the process of a pretty fundamental re-factoring and modernization of the tool's code base, which, among other things includes a de-carbonization of the tool on the mac platform. This is longer term project, being done in parallel with CS 6.0 development.

I am going to be speaking at FITC Tokyo in a couple of weeks, and will be showing some of the latest stuff we have been working on in Flash Professional.

I understand the confusion and frustration around everything that has been going on, and I know how difficult the past couple of days have been (probably the most difficult of my entire career). As I mentioned above, I am working on a broader blog post to discuss some of the news from yesterday, which will hopefully provide more information and clarification around all of the changes going on.

Please post any questions in the comments, and please keep comments on topic.

UPDATE : Just a quick reminder, but please keep comments on topic (about Flash Professional). I know there are a lot of questions about just about everything Flash, and I am working on a post to address them.